No one likes a bad day:
- The day when you get your first traffic ticket and ruin your clean streak.
- The day when you had big plans, but instead someone gets sick and
you end up cancelling everything to tend to them and take them to the
doctor, worrying and fretting because the symptoms are never something
"normal."
- The day you're running late from beginning to end, even though you had the best intentions of really being on top of things.
- The day you realize someone is hurt or offended or mad with you because, truthfully, you blew it.
- The day when you get terrible and unexpected news that just almost knocks you off your feet and takes your breath away.
- The day when you discover that something you thought was going so
well is in fact going quite terribly, and now you have your work cut out
for you to get things back in order.
- On and on and on I could go.
Have you had a no good, terrible, horrible day recently? Or maybe
just one extremely painful blemish on an otherwise perfectly good day
that somehow drained all the good out and left you feeling defeated and
snowed under?
It didn't sound especially encouraging to me this morning when I
read these words in Ecclesiastes, but the more I meditated on them, the
more hope I managed to wring from them:
In the day of prosperity be joyful,
But in the day of adversity consider:
Surely God has appointed the one as
well as the other...
Ecclesiastes 7:14
Difficult days certainly don't lend
themselves to celebration, but they do give us reason to carefully
consider what God may be up to. Oh, at the time we may be too swamped
with the work and pain and frustration and regret of it all to really
notice what God is doing. But it's always a good idea to at least look
back and see if we can notice the hand of God intervening on our
especially no good, horrible, bad day.
We may see that God used our terrible day to:
- intentionally slow us down so we would seek Him.
- cause us to address matters we had previously avoided.
- put particular people in our path we would not otherwise have encountered.
- sit us down so we can get some much needed rest, physically or emotionally.
- force us to resolve unfinished business.
- draw our attention to something He is doing in someone else's life.
- discipline us because we've fallen into ungodly habits that are hurting us or others.
I take great comfort in knowing that God has purpose for everything
He allows to come into my life. He causes all things to work together
for good in my life. That doesn't mean He makes everything turn out in a
way that makes me jump up and down in glee. But it means He is
constantly at work, on the good days and the bad, to make me more like
Jesus, to refine me.
So the next time you experience one of those no good, horrible,
terrible, very bad days, just remember that God is still up to some good
in your life. He has appointed this day. This is the day (even if it
feels like an especially ugly one at the time) that God has made for
you, and you can rejoice and be glad in it!Labels: Walk Through the Bible